After confronting unprecedented challenges in the last decade, accounting firms have undertaken extensive effort to improve the basic financial statement audit and to expand external assurance beyond the traditional audit. The re‐examination of audit methods has produced a new emphasis on assessing business and process risks in the conduct of an audit. This paper describes the fundamental changes in the audit process and examines their impact in an actual engagement. We first identify outcomes that we expect to observe in an audit based on the business risk model and then study an actual engagement to gather preliminary evidence about our expectations.